This story appeared in the Antelope Valley Press on Sunday, 1/22/06
By LISA WAHLA HOWARD
Valley Press Staff Writer

On a June morning in 2003, David found himself on the 11:45 train to Lancaster from Union Station in Los Angeles, carrying only a laundry bag of belongings. He wasn't simply looking for a new start. He was fleeing an abusive relationship, heading to one of the handful of domestic violence shelters in the nation that offer refuge to female and male victims.

More than 15 years ago, the Valley Oasis shelter, operated by the Antelope Valley Domestic Violence Council, became the first in the country to give refuge to victims regardless of their gender.

"Our philosophy is that domestic violence is a societal problem," said Carol Ensign, the shelter's executive director. "Nobody deserves to get hit, whether they are 2 months old or 80 years old, whether they are a man or woman, child or teen. Nobody deserves violence in their lives."

The AV Domestic Violence Council has served some 400 men over the years, Ensign said, with the number of males coming into the shelter increasing to about three every 60-day cycle. The emergency shelter offers housing for 60 days, with some clients then accepted into a transitional housing program.

Ensign said she believes more men would seek shelter at Valley Oasis if it were in a major metropolitan area. Even so, battered men travel to the shelter from distant states and even Canada.

That's because so few options are available, despite studies showing that men and women are equally likely to initiate violence against their partners.

For David, the trip to the shelter took him across the county, not across the country. He asked that his real name not be used for fear of retaliation.

"Thank God for this place out here," he said, musing on the situation he describes as "this monster that took on a life of its own."

The relationship lasted about two years, with his boyfriend's controlling behavior obvious at the beginning and the violence beginning about six months later.

After the first physical altercation, David left. But he later returned.

That would become something of a habit, with David leaving more than a half dozen times, only to be harassed by 20 to 30 cell-phone calls a day until he'd relent to a reunion.

"Everywhere I'd go, he would find me. He made it very clear, this was an ownership, not a relationship," David said.

The 39-year-old man relayed stories of manipulation, stalking and a forced alienation from friends, family, hobbies and work opportunities.

"In the end, it wasn't about love. I don't know that he did love me."

During one violent encounter, David was struck by a frightening realization: Pinned into submission, with his partner's knee pressed into his throat, David knew he was about to pass out.

A troubling thought came to him in the moment before he lost consciousness: "I'm going to die, and I'm not going to fight back. I'm going to let him do this."

The next day, his throat sore, David talked to his boyfriend - the man David, at one time, hoped to spend the rest of his life with.

"One of these days, you're going to lose it, and you're going to kill me. And the thing that scares me is, I'm going to let you do it," he recalled saying.

His partner's response was chilling: "I would never kill you. I know exactly what I'm doing."

Worse than the physical violence was the "mental stuff that gets into your head," David said.

"The physical things heal," he said. "But dealing with the mental stuff, when they get in your head, that's where the damage to who you are as a person can occur. They strip you of your identity."

Finally, enough was enough. While his partner was in the shower, David grabbed a few things and hid them in a laundry bag outside in the bushes. The next day, with a referral from the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center, David checked into Valley Oasis.

Through counseling and group sessions, David slowly emerged from the fog of the destructive relationship.

"There are things I had forgotten about myself, that I didn't start feeling again until I was out here," he said.

"I had been so focused on this individual, this situation … my focus shifted more on survival. It distracts you from being you."

"They (Valley Oasis) gave me the structure and the time that I needed to get my head cleared up … the tools I needed to understand myself and also recognize things in other people."

Pat Overberg was the shelter's executive director from May 1990 to September 1998. She remembered the phone call she took from a San Pedro man not long into her tenure: "He said, 'I've been trying to get some help down there, and they won't even let me come in for counseling. They were very nasty to me.' "

Overberg invited the man to come up to Lancaster for counseling and shelter. After a couple of other men called, reporting violence by their wives, Overberg told her staff, "From now on, we're taking in men."

At that time, gay men made up the vast majority of male clients, Overberg said. Today, gay men outnumber straight men seeking shelter at Valley Oasis by roughly a 60-40 margin, Ensign said.

Still, plenty of men beaten by their wives or girlfriends need the help, Ensign said.

"I think we don't want to hear that women are capable or have a desire to be violent. But we as women (can be) incredibly violent. We all have those ugly spots," she said.

National statistics on domestic violence estimate about 1.5 million female victims and more than 800,000 male victims each year, according to a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control.

But Martin Fiebert, a social scientist at California State University, Long Beach, reports that men and women in relationships are equally likely to be violent to one another.

"That's based not on crime reports or emergency-room situations, but on social science surveys, when we ask people to respond directly or anonymously to how many times have you attacked your partner or been attacked by your partner," he said.

"Men are much more likely to not come to a treatment facility, to pass it off as an ordinary injury," said Fiebert, who has studied family violence for 10 years. "It's too shameful, too humiliating."

Stanley Green, an expert on the subject, agrees.

"A lot of men don't identify what's happening to them as abuse," said Green, who speaks for national victims advocacy group Stop Abuse for Everyone.

"When asked, men will identify the specific acts - 'she cut me with a knife,' 'she hit me with a frying pan' - but they won't use words like 'abuse.' "

Also, instead of getting help when they report the problem, the men sometimes are laughed at, ignored or even hauled off to jail.

Green speaks from experience. In the worst attack by his then-wife, in December 1990, he ended up with cuts and bruises from his head to his groin, along with internal injuries and skeletal damage.

Later, a police officer examining his external injuries told Green, "The person capable of doing this to you is capable of killing you. You need to stay in hiding," Green said.

But when Green sought a restraining order, the court commissioner laughed.

"He said you have to expect one knock-down, drag-out fight per divorce and issued a mutual restraining order," Green said.

This came even after the judge was handed X-rays showing Green's skeletal damage. Green, at a slight 135 pounds, was dwarfed by his soon-to-be ex-wife, who weighed in at more than 200 pounds.

"I lost nearly everything economically, and she got sole physical custody and sole legal custody of our children," he said.

To maintain contact with his children, Green followed his ex-wife and kids when they moved from Southern California to rural eastern Washington. His daughter is now 17, and his son is in college.

Keeping close to their children is one of the reasons male victims sometimes don't seek help.

"Often they don't get out because they're afraid they'll lose the kids. The courts are more likely to assign custody to women than men, even if the women are abusive," Fiebert said.

"And men, just like women, will think, 'She really does love me, it's an aberration, it's not going to last this way.' "

Female abusers show many similarities to male abusers, Ensign said.

"Most of them are very charming. They know how to stroke the male's ego," she said.

"It's that very talent that later destroys the male (when she says) 'Who wants you? You're worthless. You're a lousy lover.'

"They utilize very similar tactics of berating, belittling, demeaning," Ensign said.

"One of the things that's across the board for victims, if you've ever experienced psychological battering - sometimes it's better to get hit. … Yes, physical (abuse) kills, and physical abuse causes broken bones, but when you're spiritually killed, that also creates a death in a human being that sometimes can't be reborn."

In terms of physical violence, women often "equalize their power by using a weapon or attacking their partner when he is vulnerable, like when he is asleep," Fiebert said.

Ensign has aided men who have had objects thrown at them or been attacked with frying pans or, in one case, a large frozen salmon that the woman then defrosted and consumed "so the weapon was gone."

"One woman actually sewed her husband into the sheets and then woke him up and took a cast iron skillet to him. He couldn't get up," she said.

The men are often much bigger than their attackers, but because of societal conventions against men striking women, they refuse to defend themselves.

In the salmon incident, "This was a guy who had been in prison. This was not some namby-pamby guy. You looked at him and he could be scary (looking)," Ensign said.

Ensign can tell story after story of men who needed help because of abusive partners - help they received at Valley Oasis.

"Pat Overberg made it the mission of this agency to never turn anyone away. We're proud of that," Ensign said.

As for domestic-violence services nationwide, Green said, "Very few of them have the level of competence that Pat Overberg and Carol Ensign have brought to Valley Oasis."

Valley Oasis' philosophy is not universally embraced. Because awareness of domestic violence was raised by the women's movement, some agencies make little effort to help men, men's advocates say.

Los Angeles attorney Marc Angelucci is fighting through the legal system to bring equity to male victims of domestic violence.

In October, he filed a lawsuit on behalf of three men and one woman - she's the daughter of one of the male victims - who say they were denied help at state-funded domestic-violence agencies.

"Some shelters will provide hotel arrangements, but from our experience, they're not getting even shelter services or anything offered to them. They're just getting referred to Valley Oasis," said Angelucci, an activist who is the L.A. chapter president of the National Coalition of Free Men.

"It's a problem that's been neglected a long time. You're ahead of the entire nation right there in Lancaster," Angelucci said.

lhoward@avpress.com